Hands-on: Google music streams useful, not revolutionary

Google has added streaming music results to its normal search page from a …

As expected, Google announced Wednesday that it was indeed adding music streams to its search results thanks to a partnership with Lala, MySpace (with streaming from iLike), Rhapsody, and imeem. The search giant has struck licensing deals with EMI, Universal, Warner Music, and Sony Music to bring streams of popular music to the search page via the streaming partners, while the likes of iLike and Lala will be bringing their collection of independent artists as well.

Now, whenever you search for a musical artist, a song, or even a lyric (thanks to Gracenote), Google will include streams right there in your search results along with links to the other services. We decided to give this new feature a run-through to see just what it could handle, and came away (mostly) liking what we saw.

For now, Google's musical search results are limited to the United States. This will be a disappointment for the millions of Google users who live elsewhere, but as we have learned from many years of music coverage, this has to be a licensing issue with the music labels. Google says that the feature is slowly rolling out across the US, but if you want to test it out right this minute, you can go to a special page to run your search queries. That's what we did.

A search for Aerosmith put four of the band's most popular songs at the top of the search results with little Play buttons for each, along with links to see more songs at Lala:

Clicking to play a song triggers a pop-up that will automatically begin streaming the song:

Though Lala makes its money from 10 cent unlimited streams, your first stream from Google will be in-full and free. If you click the link to see more from this artist on Lala, a new window opens to Aerosmith's dedicated page. As you can see, there's also a button to buy the unrestricted MP3, as well as the price (a detail that we find to be handy, since we can see right away whether it's worth buying here or shopping around).

The other links underneath the search results in Google point to iLike, Rhapsody, Pandora, and imeem, and that artist's pages come up on the respective sites if you choose to click through on those.

But you don't always know the artist you're searching for when you get the compulsion to hit up Google—sometimes you have a specific song in your head, or just one line of a song that you can't identify. That's where the music results really come in handy. Searching for a song name will usually turn up one or more artists that have sung that song:

You can also search for a lyric snippet and Google will at least make an attempt to find the right song:

In our testing, however, searching by lyric was hit or miss in terms of getting a streaming result. Many of the (not-very-obscure) lyrics we searched for didn't produce music results, though Google itself—as a normal search engine—did manage to find other websites that had the lyrics we were looking for, but no streaming songs:

Google admits that the system is not perfect, but it's getting there. "There's a lot of music out there in the world, and in some instances, we may not return links to the song you're looking for," the company wrote on the Official Google Blog. "But by combining the strength of Google's search algorithms with our music search partners' efforts to increase the comprehensiveness of their music content, we're on track to answer more of your rhymes with the right rhythms."

Indeed, we found the music results to be a nifty addition to our regular search results, and we welcome the immediate availability of streams when we're searching for a particular song or artist. There's really no untapped market for Google to aim at with the new service. After all, almost everyone knows where to find music if they want it, but it's definitely a useful feature for those who casually hit up Google for any little inquiry and just so happen to be presented with streaming results. We can think of numerous times when we have been searching for music-related info on Google without knowing all of the details (a song name but not an artist, or an artist in search of a list of songs).

So occasionally useful, yes. Game changing? No. As we discussed with Interpret, LLC VP of Strategy and Analysis Michael Gartenberg last week, the online music market is already quite mature and this may not even drive significant traffic after the initial launch. Still, we're having fun with the new feature, and it may even spur some new music discoveries as the service continues to grow.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui